Peace and paranoia converge in spring art exhibition

April 22, 2014

Updated 12:00 a.m.

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A Tibetian Buddhist skullcap was used in rituals. The exhibit strives to show the different ways that Buddha is characterized and different moments from Buddhaâ€™s life.
GREG ANDERSEN
,
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

A Tibetian Buddhist skullcap was used in rituals. The exhibit strives to show the different ways that Buddha is characterized and different moments from Buddhaâ€™s life.
GREG ANDERSEN
,
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The Doy and Dee Henley Galleria spring art exhibition at the Argyros Forum brings together peaceful relics of the Buddha, leisure street photography of a recovering Paris after World War II, and tense propaganda art of Joseph Stalin’s rise and fall from power.

“Stalin’s Russia: Visions of Happiness, Omens of Terror” began out of a collaboration with the Pacific Symphony, which was surveying Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich’s work, said Wendy Salmond, an art history professor who curated the Stalin exhibit.

The composer grew up in Russia throughout Stalin’s rise and fall from power, so the exhibit’s aim was to re-create the world he grew up in. “It just makes you think a lot about creative freedom, what it means to be an artist or a composer in a state where you don’t have much choice,” Salmond said.

The exhibition brings together artifacts from Stalin’s early days in politics, including an early portrait of him mimicking Vladimir Lenin’s wardrobe. Images of Stalin in propaganda posters on the gallery wall have almost universally the same pose: eyes looking out into the distance with a calm face.

One portion of the exhibit shows how he used children in his messaging as well. An amateur painting based on a 1936 newspaper photo of 6-year-old Gelia Markizova, daughter of the Buriat-Mongol commissar of agriculture, shows her presenting Stalin a bouquet, hugging him and both smiling. Six years after that moment, Markizova’s parents were killed as part of Stalin’s Great Purge, and she became an orphan.

“Even this tiny amount that we put together here, you can feel kind of the obsessiveness of his constant presence in people’s lives,” Salmond added.

“Buddhism: Stories and Symbols” is a collection of Buddha and Buddha deity imagery from more than 10 different countries, including Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Korea, Japan, Tibet and China.

“I wanted to show a wide variety of Buddhas from all over Asia,” said Ed Fosmire, adjunct professor and specialist in Asian artwork.

Fosmire wanted to show the different ways the Buddha is characterized, different moments from the Buddha’s life, and the symbols associated with the Buddha. Some of the pieces include a mobile shrine from China the size of an adult hand used probably to proselytize and an engraved cup depicting demonic-like figures that was used in rituals and was also made from a human skull, Fosmire said.

“Benjamen Chinn: Paris 1950-1951” is black-and-white photography of Chinn during his time in postwar Paris.

Chinn, born in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1920s, was taught by Ansel Adams and developed his fine art photography through street photography, said Natalie Lawler, an assistant registrar and preparator of the Escalette permanent collection at Chapman. Chinn developed his photography by documenting life in Chinatown and later continued to refine his craft by going to Paris in the 1950s.

Chinn captured life on the street as it happened, including images of brick layers, a man smoking a cigarette as he swept the floor and a couple pushing their baby in a stroller.

“He was really, really good at being able to disappear into a scene and just be among the people and really capture what they’re really about rather than posing them,” Lawler said.

Located on the second floor of the Doy and Dee Henley Galleria, the artwork is on loan from private and public collections. The exhibit is open to the public during school hours and runs until May 30.

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